5.2Space Invaders: World Defense
THE PROJECT
Leveraging Google's ground-breaking GeoSpatial API, Space Invaders was reimagined to be playable in Augmented Reality, taking contextual data from the user's environment such as time of day and weather to influence gameplay.
The user switches between two game modes via a portal: the World Dimension in full AR and the Invaders Dimension, a digital environment generated based on the user’s surroundings. Throughout gameplay users travel between the dimensions, destroying the Space Invaders to try and achieve scores that top the leaderboard.
THE CHALLENGE
Ensuring the build correctly adapted to various environments, most of which were not easily accessible throughout testing, required careful planning to test and validate.
A regional leaderboard system that tracked the scores of users playing in their local area was also built into the experience. Ensuring components of a build that are dynamically responsive to a user’s environment will work reliably in production is challenging, and simply testing these elements in isolation with mocked data is not always sufficient.
THE APPROACH
Test planning played a huge part in reducing risk ahead of the launch. We carefully defined test cases to cover a range of scenarios, ensuring as many use cases as possible were explored.
Conducting as much testing as possible in a real-to-life setting; travelling to various locations to ensure the build behaved as expected; using cellular data to ensure build performance did not degrade when network speed was sub-optimal; and implementing various debug tools to cover more edge-case scenarios and allow the team to simulate multiple conditions were all essential to this project’s success.
THE RESULT
Our multifaceted testing strategy paid off. The final app was well-received and successfully showcased the capabilities of Google GeoSpatial API and Streetscape Geometry API.
Heavily promoted on Google’s own blogs, this project led to some excellent technical case study material for Google themselves, and favourable press coverage for Taito. It won several awards in the DOOH space. The app was deployed to both Apple and Android app stores, compatible with a wide range of devices.
Agency: UNIT9
Type: Native App (Spacial)
Year: 2023